


Starchild

by empyrean



Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-14
Updated: 2012-04-14
Packaged: 2017-11-03 15:09:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/382792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/empyrean/pseuds/empyrean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One night Jane teaches Thor the basics of Western astronomy, and Thor tries to describe Asgard. Then the Bifröst breaks, and Jane isn't having that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Starchild

It is late. Or early, perhaps, he can no longer tell time from the air as he is used to. There is a smell of sand and dust and _quiet_. Night birds are wheeling in this alien sky and Jane Foster sits in the near-dark hunched over her journal, muttering soft words to herself. He initially thinks she’s speaking in tongues until she snaps _stupid stupid Jane_ and flips to a new page, her pen flying across the paper.

Ah. Inspiration, then.

She blinks up at him as he rekindles the bonfire she has allowed to burn down to the embers, tilts her head and smiles.

‘I’m getting an idea, I think. Your Yggdrasil helped.’

He settles next to her, watches rather than listens as she talks, waves her hands, smiles, frowns, _glows_. He doesn’t understand half of what she says, the words she uses too different from the ones he might know. But he watches and wonders if, from high-seat Hliðskjálf Loki is watching too.

Jane reminds him, for one long painful moment, of his brother. They would both rather learn than battle. And still they are both cowed by neither defeat nor threat nor fear. He wonders for an even longer moment if Loki would appreciate the star-brightness of her mind. She has not Loki’s silver-tongued guile. But they both burn within.

Eventually her voice trails away from her numbers, facts, distances of stars and the black spaces in between. He turns to look at her, watches her stare upwards as if she, like Heimdall, could sweep away the spots of light and see everything that lay within and beyond.

‘Jane?’

She smiles, bites her lip. ‘The stars are all different here, right?’

‘Yes. Some I think I may know, others are ...’ He tries to find a way of expressing it, a familiar map with all points removed. ‘Wrong.’

‘Do you have stories for them?’

‘Stories?’

She raises one hand to point. ‘See that chain of stars? That’s the belt of Orion, the hunter. Then Perseus, Gemini, Taurus.’

She speaks slowly, hesitating at first but her voice gathering strength as old stories remember themselves to her. A saga of beasts and heroes. Bears and snakes, giants and children. Separated companions, flocks of sparrows. Jane Foster, born to science, has a touch of poetry in her soul.

She leans against him, and just as seamlessly her voice blends into his. He tells her star-stories from Asgard. Wars, weapons, old warriors broken by battle and returning to the sky. Bright lords and ladies. Lovers. Monsters. Destinies.

Jane breathes into his ear _Not so different._

He continues talking about everything he can think of. His father’s ravens. His mother, the only person able to outwit Odin Allfather, Spear-Shaker, Flashing Eye, God of the Hanged. Sif, who never allowed anyone to tell her no. His brother the trickster, clever as a child and cleverer still now. The midsummer sky over Asgard. The walkways so delicate in their complexity it felt like walking on light.

She dozes against his shoulder, journal hanging precariously from her loose fingers. His crude drawing of the world-tree transformed by her writing in a way his people would never have considered, for better or worse. She frowns in her sleep, but leans into him as it grows colder, her hand smudging the ink branches even more. She will complain, come morning. He understands her well enough for that. But he is still content to watch her small fingers blur the closest remnant of home than a sky that stays empty and a hammer he cannot lift. The air grows lighter and staler, and for a while he doesn’t wish himself anywhere else.

Afterwards, after Loki and the jötunn and the breaking of the Bifröst, he stands at the shattered edge next to Heimdall and tries not to see the eternal shifting of the cosmos around them. Tries not to see his brother forever falling into nothingness.

The stars above him are familiar once more.

Mjölnir feels as heavy as it did when he could not wield it.

‘Can you see her?’

*

It takes a while. It takes a very long while. But one day the remains of the Bifröst shiver suddenly, as though caught in a gale a very long way away. A rumble of uneasy old power that says _something is coming_.

Thor sees it from the palace.

He’s running before he has even realised he has stood up.

He stumbles to a stop next to golden armour, chances a look at the watcher’s face. Tries to see what forever eyes see. Heimdall does not smile. But now, he just might be.

Another shudder, a roar across space, and the rainbow bridge opens once more.

And when the dust clears, and Odin speaks in a voice that has shaken seas and mountains and stars, Jane Foster, born to Fosters and science and mortality, simply says ‘Hello, Odin Allfather.’

(He loves her, oh how he loves her.)

He steps past his father, sees the SHIELD agents and scientists without truly seeing them, his gaze fixed on Jane standing small and proud in the blasted circle the humans arrived in. She waves the same battered journal at him, grinning as Asgardian power dissipates around her in a golden breeze. Gratitude ties him into knots and leaves him mute.

She enabled him to save Asgard and Asgard is part of him, the loveliest thing in all the universe that is not Jane Foster.

She tilts her head as he approaches, the light of Asgard’s sky casting their own pattern onto her skin. ‘Hey, you.’

He is stuck for words still. There is another way.

He lifts her knuckles to his lips. Her fingers around his are covered in nicks and scars, small burns. Her nails are broken; there is dirt caught under them, there is a sickle-shaped cut on her knuckle and suddenly she is so beautiful it almost hurts to be touching her.

He kisses her hand. Her smile is a foreign sun rising on an alien land.

**Author's Note:**

> Hliðskjálf is the seat of Odin in Asgard, from it he can see all the world.
> 
> It should probably be ‘Æsir’ rather than ‘Asgardian’ but oh well.


End file.
